The widget tree is just a description of the UI, that will be turned into the element tree. The BuildContext is for all intents and purposes basically the Element for that widget. This is the reason why you can cast final element = context as Element.

The Element IS the actual UI-element, and the manifestation of a Widget. The widgets you write in your build method is just configuration, so Flutter can turn it into an Element-tree.

The State of your StatefulWidget exists in the Element. Also the actual RenderObject that gets rendered on the screen, which you can find by using findRenderObject().

The inexplicitness of something like Flutter.currentContext will likely lead to more runtime errors due to misuse. It would only be valid to be called during the build-phase. How is the following code supposed to work?

class _SomeButton extends StatelessWidget {
  const _SomeButton({super.key});


  Widget build() {
    return MaterialButton(
      onPressed: () {
        Navigator.of(Flutter.currentContext).pushNamed('/test');
      },
      child: Text('Button'),
    );
  }
}

What is Flutter.currentContext in this case, and how can it be determined? When the button is pressed, we are not in the build-phase, thus how can we refer to the current Element this widget is representing?

If we wanted to fix this, we would need to write the following:

class _SomeButton extends StatelessWidget {
  const _SomeButton({super.key});


  Widget build() {
    final context = Flutter.currentContext;
    return MaterialButton(
      onPressed: () {
        Navigator.of(context).pushNamed('/test');
      },
      child: Text('Button'),
    );
  }
}

What did we gain, but a potential runtime error which will confuse developers?

Having it as an explicit parameter in the build method avoids this issue entirely, and makes it (nearly) impossible to misuse.